Britain Must Not Expel the Chagossians Again

In the BIOT Supreme Court, Chagossian islanders are fighting not merely a removal order, but the repetition of one of the ugliest injustices in modern British history

There are court cases about technicalities, and there are court cases about the soul of a country. The hearing now under way in the Supreme Court of the British Indian Ocean Territory is the latter.

The Chagossian claimants, all Chagossians by birth or descent, are asking the court to stop the British state from doing something that should have become unthinkable decades ago: removing Chagossians from the Chagos Islands once again. According to the claim now before the court, Louis Misley Mandarin, Louis Michel Mandarin, Louis Antoine Lemettre and Guy Shane Adrien Castel are challenging both the failure to grant them any permit to be present in their homeland and the legality of the removal notices served on them after they reached the islands in February. The hearing is currently taking place in London before the Chief Justice of the BIOT. The Chagossians on the islands and around the world are listening in.

The sheer obscenity of the proposition bears repeating. Britain forcibly exiled the Chagossians from their homeland between the late 1960s and 1973. It then spent decades defending the consequences of that expulsion in court, in Parliament and in diplomacy. And now, in 2026, with Chagossians physically back on their islands, the British state is once again asserting the power to remove them.

Not from Diego Garcia itself, the island dominated by the US-UK military base, but from outer islands more than 100 miles away. Even the public account of the claimants’ own lawyers states that the Chagossians who made the journey are currently in the archipelago on an island over 100 miles from Diego Garcia. 

That fact matters. In truth, it is the hinge on which this whole case turns.

For decades Britain justified Chagossian exclusion on the ground of national security. The existence of the military base on Diego Garcia was treated not merely as a reason to restrict access to one island, but as the basis for excluding an entire people from their entire homeland. But that position has now collapsed under the weight of Britain’s own conduct. Public reporting on the claim notes that the UK’s position has “dramatically changed” and that it is no longer asserted that no persons could safely be present on the outer islands; indeed, the background to the UK-Mauritius settlement contemplates resettlement on the outer islands while maintaining the Diego Garcia base. 

And that is why this case is so devastating for the Labour government.

Because once Britain accepts that Chagossians may in future resettle the outer islands, once it accepts that civilian presence on those islands is not inherently incompatible with the continued operation of the base on Diego Garcia, the old blanket rationale for exclusion is gone. Finished. It cannot then turn around and say that these Chagossians, on these outer islands, at this moment, must be removed because their presence is somehow intolerable.

A government cannot say: not now, but later; not you, but perhaps Chagossians in general; not while the islands are under British control, but possibly once sovereignty changes hands. That is not principle. It is evasion dressed up as administration.

The skeleton argument provided by the Chagossian lawyers lays out the contradiction with devastating force. The claimants argue that if the power to grant permits or the discretion not to remove were said to be hindered by the BIOT constitutional framework, then that framework itself becomes unlawful in present circumstances. Why? Because the statutory rationale for denying a right of abode was expressly tied to defence purposes. Yet, as the claimants point out, the UK has already made the underlying national security judgment that outer-island settlement is compatible with the continued military arrangements on Diego Garcia.

That should be the end of the matter.

Instead, it appears to have become the beginning of a fresh injustice.

A people exiled, a history denied, a return obstructed

The moral force of this case does not depend on sentimentality. It depends on historical fact.

The Chagossians were not tourists. They were not opportunists. They were not a transient population wandering through a strategic zone. They were a settled people with births, marriages, graves and generations rooted in the archipelago. The skeleton argument reminds the court that this is now established fact, not romantic nationalist myth. It cites the long and shameful litigation history in which British courts themselves recorded the “callous disregard” with which the islanders were treated and the wider historical record of deliberate depopulation.

The language from the older cases still stings because it should. The Chagossians were uprooted from the only way of life they knew. Families were expelled. A population was removed in the interests of the powerful. What happened in the Chagos Islands was not some regrettable side effect of history. It was a colonial act, planned and executed by the British state.

The skeleton argument is right to insist that the court keep that history “firmly in mind”. To treat this case as though it were merely about immigration control, permits, timetables or technical compliance would be to miss the point completely. The state is not dealing with ordinary entrants to a territory. It is dealing with the descendants, and in one case the survivor, of the people it itself drove out.

One claimant, Louis Michel Mandarin, was born in the Chagos Archipelago in 1953 to a family of indigenous inhabitants stretching back to his great-grandfather. Another, Louis Antoine Lemettre, was removed while still in his mother’s womb and was thus denied birth in the land of his conception. The first claimant, Misley Mandarin, was born in exile, the child of that injustice, and is now the elected First Minister of the Chagossian Government-in-Exile, albeit not formally recognised by the UK government. These details matter because they strip away the coldness of official language. The people now fighting removal are not abstractions. They are the living continuity of a people Britain attempted to erase from the map.

The skeleton argument goes further still. It says that one of the Chagossians’ present fears is that Britain is again trying to deny their existence as a settled people, precisely in order to sideline them in decisions about their own homeland. That is not paranoia. It reflects a pattern. The denial of a people’s reality has always been the prelude to the denial of their rights.

They asked first. Britain stalled. Then Britain moved fast to expel them.

One of the most striking features of the claimants’ case is not simply that removal notices were issued, but the way the state appears to have behaved before they arrived.

According to the skeleton argument, their lawyers wrote to BIOT officials in October 2025 raising the possibility of a visit as native Chagossians. There were follow-up messages. Automatic replies. Delay. Eventually an answer arrived saying, in substance, that this was really a matter for the FCDO; that heritage visits had been paused during Covid and then delayed by sovereignty negotiations; that the UK was working with Mauritius to resume them; and that “more information” would be available in due course.

Then came more delay.

In February 2026, the claimants’ lawyers chased again. They pointed out that heritage visits had supposedly been agreed to resume in 2025, yet by 2026 none had happened. Again, no real route was offered. Again, no dates. Again, no actual access.

That pattern is central to the case. The claimants say the attempts to obtain lawful visitation were genuine but frustrated. They argue that the Commissioner unlawfully failed to exercise the statutory power to grant permits, and that there has not been a single heritage visit for Chagossians since February 2020. The government’s own evidence, they say, acknowledges the long gap.

This is not a minor administrative failing. It goes to the heart of the state’s credibility.

When Chagossians sought a lawful path, the system yielded silence, buck-passing and indefinite postponement. Yet once Chagossians actually reached their homeland, the machinery of enforcement functioned with extraordinary speed. The claim says the claimants sailed to the islands around 16 February 2026, that officials became aware of their presence on 17 February, and that by 18 February removal notices had already been served.

That contrast tells its own story.

The state that could not organise a heritage visit for years found no difficulty in organising a removal order within days.

The state that could not produce a date for lawful return could produce an instrument of exclusion almost immediately.

The state that had no practical route for Chagossians to stand on their homeland had a very practical route for telling them to leave it.

That is not neutral governance. It is a bias in action.

No reasons, no hearing, no fairness

The legal note is especially powerful on procedure, and rightly so. Governments that know their moral case is weak often retreat into process. Here, the claimants argue, even the process was rotten.

The removal notices, they say, were issued without any prior inquiry into the claimants’ circumstances, without any discussion with them, without any warning that removal was under consideration, without any real opportunity to make representations, and without any reasons being given in the notices themselves. On the claimants’ account, neither of the relevant officials had even spoken to them before the decision was taken.

That is extraordinary.

The right to be heard before an adverse decision is taken is among the oldest and simplest demands of fairness. Yet here, on the claimants’ case, Chagossians who had returned to their homeland after decades of exile were handed removal notices first and heard later, if at all.

The appeal process, the claim argues, was scarcely better. The Commissioner dismissed their appeals on 25 February. But the claimants say the appeal was handled unfairly too: no proper inquiry, no invitation to articulate grounds, no meaningful engagement with the material already before the decision-maker, no adequate reasons.

If those allegations are made out, this is not merely hard-edged administration. It is administration that did not seriously trouble itself to be fair.

And that matters doubly in a case like this. Where the state is contemplating removal from a homeland rather than routine border control, where the history includes prior forced expulsion by that same state, where the very point in issue is whether the powers are being exercised lawfully against a historically persecuted people, fairness is not optional decoration. It is the minimum required for legitimacy.

The claimants say they did not get even that minimum.

The government’s contradiction is fatal

But the most devastating section of the skeleton argument is the one that turns the government’s own position against it.

The claim points out that the sole constitutional rationale for denying a right of abode in BIOT was defence. Section 9 of the 2004 Constitution Order expressly says the territory was constituted and set aside to be available for defence purposes. That is the premise on which the right of abode was displaced. It follows, the claimants argue, that where defence no longer requires the outer islands to be empty of Chagossians, the legal and constitutional logic of exclusion is fundamentally undermined.

This is not some airy political argument. It is a direct legal challenge to the way statutory purpose operates.

If the restriction exists for national security, and national security no longer requires exclusion from the outer islands, why should Chagossians on the outer islands be treated as removable trespassers rather than as a people with a powerful claim to be there?

The note presses the point again and again. The UK has accepted that future settlement on outer islands is compatible with the continued leaseback of Diego Garcia. The claimants are on Peros Banhos, well over 100 miles away. The government does not contend that these four claimants themselves are a threat. Indeed, according to the claimants, the government’s later attempts to conjure vague security concerns are both after-the-fact and absurd, especially given that the planned sovereignty arrangements would leave the outer islands without the same British control while still not being regarded as a national-security crisis.

That is the contradiction Labour cannot escape.

Either outer-island civilian presence is compatible with defence, or it is not.

If it is compatible, then the logic of refusing permits and issuing removal notices to these Chagossians falls apart.

If it is not compatible, then the government’s own treaty-based narrative about future resettlement and resumed heritage visits begins to look like a fiction.

It cannot have it both ways.

Heritage visits for yachts, scientists and others — but not for the people of the islands?

The legal note also exposes a deeper indignity: differential treatment.

According to the claimants, permits have been issued to yachts to moor in designated areas on islands other than Diego Garcia. People aboard are allowed to disembark. Scientists receive permits. Contractors receive permits. Others have been permitted presence without the kind of paralysis that seems to afflict the system whenever Chagossians seek to go home.

That contrast is devastating because it reveals the real scandal at the centre of BIOT governance.

The islands are not inaccessible in any absolute sense. They are inaccessible in a selective sense.

Boats may come.
Visitors may come.
Contractors may come.
Scientists may come.

But the people to whom the islands actually belong by birth, descent, memory and history are made to wait, or refused, or threatened with removal once they arrive.

It is hard to imagine a better encapsulation of colonial logic than that.

The homeland is open to passage, research, administration and managed leisure, but not to the people from whom it was taken.

This is not only a legal wrong. It is a moral obscenity.

The skeleton argument, unusually and powerfully, does not stop at public law. It moves into the language of international law, self-determination, racial discrimination and even crimes against humanity.

Some will say that such arguments are too dramatic. They are not.

The claimants’ case is that forced removal and continuing exclusion cannot be understood apart from the original deportation of the Chagossians and its ongoing effects. They say that any attempt now to remove Chagossians again would repeat, and perhaps continue, the very wrong at the centre of Chagos history.

Even those who hesitate before the most far-reaching legal characterisations should grasp the moral point immediately. A state that once expelled a people from their homeland bears an extraordinary burden before it can claim a lawful or legitimate right to expel them again. It must show not merely technical power, but compelling justice. And here, on the face of the claimants’ case, it has shown neither.

The claimants also invoke self-determination, cultural rights and equality. Again, they are right to do so. What is at stake is not only whether four named men can remain where they are. It is whether the Chagossians are to be treated as a people with rights in their homeland, or as a problem to be managed around diplomatic convenience.

The old imperial habit was to decide everything first and ask the islanders later, if at all.

This case shows how much of that habit survives.

The remoteness argument should shame Britain too

There is another aspect of the skeleton argument that deserves attention because it punctures one of the softer forms of paternalism that so often accompanies colonial administration.

Peros Banhos is remote. Medical facilities are limited. Emergency access is difficult. But the claimants point out that remoteness does not extinguish autonomy. They cite other British territories and communities where citizens live despite extreme isolation and limited medical infrastructure, including Pitcairn and Tristan da Cunha. No one suggests those populations should be removed or denied the right to live at home because officials think their islands are too remote or difficult.

Why, then, does such reasoning suddenly appear when Chagossians are involved?

The answer is obvious and uncomfortable. Remoteness becomes a principle only when it serves exclusion. Otherwise, it is simply a condition of island life.

To tell Chagossians that they cannot live on or return to their own islands because those islands are remote is not enlightened concern. It is paternalism deployed as a substitute for justice.

Adults are entitled to choose hardship in the place they call home rather than comfort in exile.

Britain’s real choice

For all its legal complexity, this case is ultimately very simple.

Britain has to choose between two futures.

In one, it continues the old pattern: delay the Chagossians when they ask politely, criminalise them when they act, invoke the base when convenient, ignore the base when negotiating, promise future return while resisting present presence, and treat every Chagossian assertion of dignity as an administrative nuisance.

In the other, it faces the truth: that a people once expelled from their homeland should not have to beg for heritage visits to their own graves; that permits should not become instruments for indefinitely postponing justice; that procedural fairness is the bare minimum owed to people with this history; and that Chagossians on the outer islands are not the threat here. The threat is the continued readiness of the British state to place bureaucracy above conscience.

The court now has a chance to say that enough is enough.

It should quash the unlawful decisions.
It should reject the fiction that the state may promise return in theory while punishing return in practice.
It should insist on fresh and lawful decision-making.
Above all, it should refuse to let Britain commit the same historic wrong twice.

Because that is what this case is really about.

Not permits alone.
Not notices alone.
Not even procedure alone.

It is about whether exile is to remain the governing fact of Chagossian life.

The Chagossians who travelled to their islands in February and are there now must be allowed to stay.

Anything less would not merely repeat history.

It would disgrace Britain all over again.